By Wayne Allensworth
And at times you introduce me from within into a wholly unaccustomed state of feeling…were it made perfect in me, [it] would not be of this world…But [I] fall back again and I am swallowed up in the usual run of things. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
At mid-morning, the autumn sun was clearing the sky. White rays emanating from a new October sun, a pale, liquid-blue firmament shading to deeper hues at the apex of the sky’s dome. The moon, half shrouded with a shadow that ran diagonally across its surface, bright and gleaming but remaining a ghostly reminder of the night. Something caught my eye at the edge of my field of vision, and I turned to witness an extraordinary sight. It was a lengthy procession of black birds with wide wingspans. A vast wave of vultures that looked like the current of a dark river, heading who knows where. To an omega unimagined and forlorn. Morticians and pallbearers of the world. A grim scavenger crew heading to clean some other site, yet unknown to them, of the organic detritus of our world. Morbidity and vitality are both parts of a single metaphysical unity.
The new day spoke of life. I walked past a pond and the turtles seemed to eye me suspiciously, then they dove headlong into the green water. A small bike stood abandoned by a tree. Where had the tiny owner gone?
I had been walking this path just a few days before when I spotted something lying ahead on the sidewalk. What was it? I walked closer and what I thought had been a dead animal was in fact a very live one. A small squirrel, fallen from a tree above as best as I could tell. I bent over to eye it closely and noticed it was breathing, the ribcage expanding and contracting in a barely perceptible rhythm. Its small, almond-shaped eyes were still closed. I bent over and carefully picked it up and held it closely against my shirt, its little claws clinging to the cloth. I carried it home and placed it in a shoebox lined with an old towel and wondered what to do.
The lost baby squirrel found a home with a tiny elderly woman who said she rehabilitated wildlife for release. She thanked me and gave me a card that read
Make time for the quiet
Moments as God
Whispers and the
World is Loud
It certainly is. Loud with life. Loud with groans of suffering. And loud in its quiet moments. The squirrel will live for now. And die as all things must, life and death joined in an inescapable reverberation of eternity. An eternity we can sometimes envision. We can sense it in a fleeting moment of enhanced perception. Then it passes, and we are back in this world, with its duties, necessities, requirements, and painful decisions. Its toils and joys and frustrations. Its anger. Its hopes. Disappointments. Meaning and just a taste of fulfillment that is the deeply desired endpoint of our spiritual lives. We live in the world, and dream of something beyond it, like the source of a great river. But life moves so quickly, and in our jaded technocratic age, the noise of our machines drowns out the vague background hum of the universe. Our movements are now incessant. We barely glance through the windows of our harried lives to see the passing beauty, the tragic grandeur of creation. But it is in this world that life brings experience that makes an “I” out of a small bit of the conscious realm. Limitation is a requirement within that which is boundless.
The paradox is obvious: living in this world, embracing it, enduring it, gaining meaning from living, yet longing for the next, for a state of being that is complete. The living and the longing opposites that are both true as a matter of complementarity.
*
At the dawn of the Christian era, in the first centuries of the church as a body of believers, a certain tension within that body was evident from the beginning. A tension between the necessity of living in this world, while longing for the next. Christ had said that his kingdom was not of this world. The eschatological expectation of the coming kingdom motivated the early Christians. Give up worldly things and worldly ambitions. Keep your eyes on the kingdom yet to come. Yet as the years passed by, the community of believers was faced with the necessity of living in this world. Christ’s emissaries had told them to care for their families, to do their jobs, to fulfill all the traditional duties that sustain, reproduce and perpetuate human society. Christ had said that we must render unto Caesar that which was his. And to the world that which was required of us. Meaning was found in that.
The eschatological element, the longing for purity, to see God, to be in his presence and achieve unity with him through Christ — to be in him, and him to be in us — prompted Christians to reject the world entirely. Anchorites sought solitude, the life of the hermit, in the desert. The desert fathers preached a strict asceticism, a life of contemplating God. By stripping away the world’s distractions, they hoped to penetrate the mystery and find themselves in the presence of God. Living as a perpetual prayer. That introspective life was focused on the direct experience of God. In this way, Christian mysticism was born.
The mortification of the flesh, the rejection of the fallen world in seeking a personal ascension toward God, led to conflicts within the body of believers. Gnostics argued that the world was evil in its entirety, that the god of the Hebrew scriptures was an evil demiurge that had locked our spirits in our corrupt bodies. Only those capable of knowledge, gnosis, and understanding could achieve ascension and transfiguration, the goal being the freedom of the spirit from corrupt flesh. In the esoteric thought of the Gnostics, matter was evil. Only spirit was good.
The church’s battle with Gnosticism hinged on a rejection of the idea of the world as totally evil. Fallen, yes. But God had created the world and declared it good. The incarnation, the Word made flesh, indicated the vast importance of embodiment in Christian life. We are ourselves, living as distinct personalities through embodiment. Immersed in our life experiences, we wrestle with God, longing for meaning. The struggle itself is a form of worship, a path toward purification. We share in creation by parenting children. We fail and rise from our knees to again and again affirm the belief in grace. The Christian life is a process.
Christian asceticism touted purity of the flesh, fasting, mortification, and sexual abstinence as ideals, reflecting a striving toward perfection insofar as humans were capable of it in this world. The sexual impulse is one of — if not the — most powerful drives in the human psyche. A drive capable of creating chaos or something sublime in a human relationship. Paul wrote of the ideal of abstinence, but noted that not all were capable of it, implying a hierarchy within the spiritual realm, but rejecting the elitism of the Gnostics. The Christian mysteries were accessible to all.
The tension within the body of Christians between an active, and more worldly life, and a contemplative, solitary life, between living out the Christian story through liturgy and sacrament and life as perpetual prayer, a spiritual martyrdom, found equilibrium in monasticism. Through productive labor and daily prayer, monks both engaged with life and sought spiritual purification within the church. The body of Christians not called to that life had a model. The imitation of Christ could take on differing forms. The majority would be fathers, mothers, brothers, and neighbors living in this world while keeping one foot in the next. Some would be called to live only for God. Thus, a certain complementarity of opposites evolved. Both were true, both were necessary, both reflected in microcosm the tensions in human experience. And that complementarity expressed unity in multiplicity, a Christian concept forged in controversies over the nature of the Trinity.
The early church fathers were men such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Anthony (“The Father of Monks”), Dionysius, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine. The controversies and debates they took part in continue to this day. Free will and grace. An active life or a contemplative life. Introspective spirituality and the life of the Christian community in liturgy and sacrament. The Word in flesh and scripture. The crucifix and the empty cross.
At the extremes, hermetic anchorites rejected the world entirely, starved themselves and flirted with spiritual elitism, even, so it is claimed, castrating themselves to flee sexual temptation, self-made eunuchs for the Kingdom. Puritans and iconoclasts followed them. Others plunged headlong into the world, while losing sight of the contemplative element in a life of prayer. Christians of words, proclamations, and propositions. God sometimes presented as a sort of self-help guru. Most of us have to navigate a hazardous path between a spiritual Scylla and Charybdis represented by those extremes. And live a life that retains a sense of gratitude and joy in a tragic world.
*
Life is a miracle. The danger of an active, outward-looking life today is the loss of a sense of wonder. Mystery and wonder are obscured, the eternal hum of the universe drowned out by incessant industrial/technological noise. We race through the landscape in our ever-faster automobiles. And fly over it in jets, cocooned within, hardly noticing the spectacular sights below or amid the clouds themselves. Perpetual artificial stimulation via our visual technologies dulls a real sense of awe. We can’t readily see the world’s wonders or understand the goodness of creation. Or accept its tragic nature. Paradoxically, worldly outwardness is intensified by the technological cocoon we live in. Yet we never lose a longing for another world. For perfection we can never achieve by ourselves alone.
*
We were driving home on a Sunday evening not so long ago when my wife told me to look up. And what did I see? A blood moon. The usually white orb had taken on striking shades of orange and red. It appeared strangely closer to us, as if it sought to grab our attention, to slap us into awareness. I couldn’t remember whether I had ever even seen one before. An awesome view caused by the motions and shadows of great objects in space. A universe so vast as to be unfathomable. It reminded me that the mystics imagined God as an ultimately ineffable presence beyond our being. Not a being but being itself.
The next morning my wife and I were walking in a cool autumn light. And there, up ahead, near a stream that flowed by us, on the very peak of a tall cedar tree, a great gray heron was perched. Regal. Majestic. Behind him, the moon was setting in a blue morning sky.
So often, understanding comes late in life. But if you listen closely and block out the noise, you can hear it.
That eternal hum.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
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